Why Your AV Project Is Over Budget Before It Starts

The Problem Is Older Than the Project

By the time a client calls Kontek about a communication dream that isn’t landing, the real problem is usually years old. It was decided the day the building’s ceiling height, camera distances, and lighting plan were finalized — long before anyone thought to ask a low voltage partner what the room would need.

“Physics is not interested in your dream oftentimes,” is how Kontek’s Marques Manning puts it. A beautiful room and a functional one are two different design problems, and only one of them gets solved by an architect working alone. Low voltage sits outside that trade entirely, so a display gets modeled on a wall and nobody asks whether it can be powered, cooled, or connected.

A Sanctuary Learns What Distance Costs

Take a recent client visit. A church wanted to upgrade its streaming, and Manning started noticing the room before anyone said a word about equipment: a camera position 60 to 80 feet from the stage, prosumer-grade cameras, and lighting set soft for comfort — exactly what a speaker wants and exactly what a camera doesn’t.

“I don’t think this space was really designed with this in mind,” he told them, “because you need more lighting.” The client confirmed it: every broadcast looked flat, and everyone had quietly blamed the equipment. The room was never built for a tight, well-lit shot from that distance, and the fix now comes with real trade-offs.

Here’s the number that lands hardest. A solid prosumer 4K camera runs about $5,000. A production-level camera with the glass to hold a tight shot from 60-plus feet runs $35,000 to $50,000, plus $10,000 to $20,000 for the lens. That gap is why Kontek pushes to be in the room during programming — the earliest phase of a build, when a team can still choose a longer-range PTZ camera and route cable through a floor box instead of across it as a trip hazard.

Catching It Before the Concrete Pours

Sometimes the win is smaller and no less real. On a new four-story build, Manning reviewed the construction documents and noticed something immediately: no floor boxes anywhere, despite a conference room designed around custom tables and shared displays. “You absolutely need one,” he told the team, “unless you want cables running across the floor.” That conversation added floor boxes, conduit, and back boxing to all four stories before a single slab was poured. Catch it after the concrete sets, and the fix means core drilling instead.

Who Actually Needs to Hear This

Manning is direct about who should be making this call: whoever owns the budget, usually the construction project management team driving the project. “I can have the best looking conference rooms in the world,” he says. “If I can’t actually do video conferencing, what am I doing?”

The ideal window is the programming phase, before schematic design starts, when a team can still ask about ceiling height and structural support for something like an 800 to 1,000-pound LED wall. Reach construction documentation without that conversation, and an estimator has already built a budget without Kontek’s input — so any correction becomes an automatic increase.

More Conversations, Not Fewer

It sounds counterintuitive for a team focused on efficiency, but Manning has come to see more meetings, not fewer, as the real time-saver: “the complexity of the task will dictate the number of meetings you’re probably gonna need to have.” Catch a missing outlet in a fifteen-minute check-in, and you avoid a stoppage or a weekend spent catching back up. It’s why Kontek takes pride in a low rate of RFIs.

The room only looks effortless because these conversations happened first.